On Sunday, October 10, Mary Daly was interviewed on CBS’ Face the Nation. The San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President spoke on various issues including the economy focusing on issues such as price hikes, labor shortages and unavailability of goods for the holiday season as well as the continuing impact of the delta variant.
Answering questions from CBS’ Margaret Brennan on the impact of COVID-19 and other issues, Daly said that the current period was volatile. She spoke of its disruptions on
schools
families
ability to go to work
safety issues.
She agreed that women had left the workforce, often to take care of the elderly or children. She asked everyone to get vaccinated to put “COVID” completely behind. On being asked about inflation she spoke of supply constraints and price rise.
When asked about the bottlenecks in shipping in Long Beach and Los Angeles in California, she said that people had already started shopping for the holidays. She indicated that the key was to get more supply to both the labor market and the goods market.
According to the Daily Mail, more than a million jobs were added to the labor market in June and July. However, it slowed down in August and in September there were only 194,000 jobs.
As the U.S. has returned to normal, some people are spending all the money they had saved during the pandemic, some of which was given to them as COVID relief.
Labor shortages, mainly at ports due to small number of qualified truck drivers as well as staff having to follow strict COVID protocols, has delayed goods from reaching supermarket and store shelves. There are sufficient quantities of many goods aboard several ships but due to supply chain constraints goods are unable to reach stores.
A logistics expert, who did not wish to be named, told the Daily Mail that global infrastructure had not been designed “to handle goods at such a rate.”
The central bank will meet in November and many economists believe that although September’s job creations were low, the fed could start tapering its asset purchases.
